Event details

ISVR Engineering Research Seminar Series

The high cost, large size and power inefficiency of available ground-level monitoring equipment inhibits full coverage of many natural systems. The resulting shortage leaves large spatial and temporal data gaps in ecological surveys and facilitates unregulated exploitation of natural resources. To address the shortcomings of ground-level monitoring technology, we present an open-source hardware solution using the principle of monitoring sound. The hardware, called “AudioMoth”, allows ecologists to make a substantial shift in their monitoring methodologies, moving from passive continuous recording by individual, expensive devices, towards using multiple low-cost, smart devices that flood large and inaccessible ecosystems. AudioMoth demonstrates how lowering the cost, reducing the size and improving the power efficiencies of monitoring tools can make vast improvements to an ecological surveys spatial and temporal coverage. AudioMoth has had a large global impact in conservation research, with the AudioMoth device successfully being adopted by hundreds of the ecological community since its open-source release in 2017.

Speaker information

Andrew Hills , University of Southampton. The Authors are 3rd year PhD students in ECS at the University of Southampton. Andrew Hill develops the AudioMoth hardware. Their PhDs are interdisciplinary, combining acoustics, digital signal processing, electronics hardware design and ecology/conservation.

Peter Prince, University of Southampton. The Authors are 3rd year PhD students in ECS at the University of Southampton. Peter Prince develops the detection algorithms that run on it. Their PhDs are interdisciplinary, combining acoustics, digital signal processing, electronics hardware design and ecology/conservation.